1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for translating a class schema in a source language to a target language.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Common Information Model (CIM) provides a conceptual framework for interchanging information between management systems and applications. The CIM schema provides a set of object oriented classes with properties that are used to organize and access the information about the managed environment in a common format. The managed environment may include systems, applications, networks, and devices. Extension schemas are provided to extend the CIM to technology-specific areas, such as storage devices. To be CIM compliant, a product must implement the CIM core and common schema classes so that the CIM methods can be used to access information about the product. This requires the product vendor to develop product (e.g., application, device, system, etc.) specific code that implements the CIM classes to provide access to the product information.
Vendors that want to write programs to participate in a CIM environment use the Managed Object Format (MOF) computer language. MOF is a compiled language created by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and based on the Interface Definition Language (IDL). The MOF language is used to define static or dynamic classes and instances. Classes and instances are defined using ASCII or Unicode text and placed in a file that is submitted to a MOF compiler. The MOF compiler parses the file and adds the classes and instances defined in the file to the CIM Object Manager repository, which contains the definitions of classes and instances that represent managed objects and their relationships. In coding a MOF file, the developer may initially create a visual representation of a schema using the Microsoft Corporation Visio** program and then manually code a MOF file based on the Visio representation of the schema. **Microsoft and Visio are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation; and UML is a trademark of the Open Management Group, Inc.
Although developers may need to code their schemas in MOF to participate in the CIM environment, in many cases developers may still want to convert the MOF file into a Universal Modeling Language (UML)** file because of the abundance of software development tools available to manipulate UML representations of a schema. **Microsoft and Visio are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation; and UML is a trademark of the Open Management Group, Inc.
For these reasons, there is a need in the art to provide tools that allow for mapping of schemas between modeling languages, such as MOF and UML.